It is certain that the pyramids could not have been erected without a very considerable amount of scientific knowledge, whilst as records of engineering skill they are simply marvellous. Immense blocks were brought from a distance of 500 miles up the river, were polished like glass, and fitted into their places with such exactness that the joints could hardly be detected. ‘Nothing can be more wonderful,’ says Fergusson, ‘than the extraordinary amount of knowledge and perfect precision of execution displayed in the construction of the interior chambers and galleries; nothing more perfect mechanically has ever been executed since.’
A curious calculation has been made that the stone used in the construction of Khufu’s pyramid would make a wall of six feet high and half a yard broad, that would reach across the Atlantic from Liverpool to Newfoundland.
In the tombs which cluster round the royal pyramids have been discovered records and relics of deeper and more human interest than the pyramids themselves. At Meidoom were buried the great men of Senefru’s time. Their tombs were formed of immense blocks of stone, and have been long hidden from sight by the accumulation of soil above them. The entrance passages are covered with figures and inscriptions. The figures are wrought in a kind of mosaic work. Little square holes were made, and filled with hard cement of various colours. The brightness of the tints is wonderful, as if they had been laid on yesterday; and in some places there can be discerned upon the sand, marks of the footprints left there by the bearers of the coffin.
Netting Birds.
Here we seem brought face to face with a very remote past. All is so strangely distant and unlike, but at the same time all is strangely near and like ourselves and our own life to-day. Here, e.g., is the entrance-passage to the tomb of Nefer-mat, a high officer of state and ‘friend of the king,’ who married Atet, a royal princess. On one side of the passage we see Nefer-mat, with his wife clinging to his arm; on the other he is represented with his little son at his feet. In front of us the husband and wife are again delineated; her long hair falls loosely over her shoulders, and she places her hand upon her heart in token of devoted affection.
Atet appears to have survived her husband, and her own tomb is close at hand. Amongst the scenes depicted there is one in which Nefer-mat is employed in netting fowl; the wife is seated near, watching the sport, and servants are bringing her the game. The hieroglyphic inscription says: ‘Princess Atet receives with pleasure the game caught by the chief noble, Nefer-mat.’
In another of these tombs were discovered the wonderful statues of Ra-hotep and his beautiful wife Nefert, which are now in the museum at Boulak. Ra-hotep was a prince, very likely a son of Senefru, who died young; he was a captain in the army, and chief priest of Ra, at On. These, the most ancient known statues in the world, are ‘marvels of life-like reality.’ The Egyptians always excelled in portrait sculpture; the figures may be stiff and ill-drawn, but the faces are beyond doubt truthful and characteristic likenesses. Men of learning were held in honour at the court of these early Pharaohs, as well as architects and sculptors. But the literature of those days may be said to have perished. Portions of it, enshrined in the sacred writings, have survived, and there is, besides, one venerable manuscript of the time of the fifth dynasty, which has come down to us. It is called the Maxims of Ptah-hotep and is the oldest manuscript known. The writer was a prince by birth, and a governor; he lived to be more than a hundred years old, and after a long and varied experience of life, when the infirmities of old age had come upon him, he recorded, for the use and benefit of all, the teaching of that serene and simple wisdom which is never new and never old—such as the following:—